With the release of his tax digests, Mitt Romney reminds me of Richard Nixon.
Specifically I remember Nixon showing up on TV displaying piles of bound books. Here's the tapes! he said, gesturing woodenly (if wood could sweat.) These are the secret tape-recordings you've been bugging me about! They're all here! This proves I am not a crook!
But it wasn't the recordings. We all saw that immediately. Neatly bound and nicely printed though they were, that pile of books was an obviously thrown together snowjob of heavily edited partial transcripts. If he wasn't a crook, why didn't he let us hear the tapes?
Well we have heard them, and he was a crook. Every five or ten years since then we get to hear more of them, each one nastier than the one before. But bad as they are there are 20 minutes that must have been worse, because he erased them. And after hearing that 20 minute silence even hardened bitter-enders stopped giving Nixon any benefit of doubt.
Romney is headed that way with his taxes. It's become obvious to everybody that while what we know is bad , what he won't let us know has got to be much much worse.